Despite promises that iMessage conversations are safe, it appears that there is a method that they could up in the hands of the spooks and law enforcement.

According to the Intercept iMessages leave behind a log of which phone numbers you are poised to contact and Apple will share this with law enforcement when compelled by court order.

Apparently Apple records each query in which your phone calls home to see who’s in the iMessage system and who’s not. This log also includes the date and time when you entered a number, along with your IP address.

All this is the opposite of a 2013 Apple claim that it does not “store data related to customers’ location. ” Apparently Jobs’ Mob is compelled to turn over such information via court orders for systems known as “pen registers” or “trap and trace devices.” Apple fans might think that it is difficult for coppers to get such a court, but apparently it is not that tricky.

Government lawyers only have to prove that they are “likely” to obtain information whose “use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Jobs’ Mob confirmed that month-long log snapshots from Apple could be strung together by police to create a longer list of whose numbers someone has been entering.Apple said:

When law enforcement presents us with a valid subpoena or court order, we provide the requested information if it is in our possession. Because iMessage is encrypted end-to-end, we do not have access to the contents of those communications. In some cases, we are able to provide data from server logs that are generated from customers accessing certain apps on their devices. We work closely with law enforcement to help them understand what we can provide and make clear these query logs don’t contain the contents of conversations or prove that any communication actually took place.

Andrew Crocker, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation wondered why Apple was storying this information in the first place.

Upgrading your iPhone might cause a few problems for parents who don’t like their children seeing online porn.

The software genii at Apple have apparently configured iMessage so that it can search and place GIFs not really aware what that might do.

Needless to say, at least one person noticed that when they searched the word “butt” they were getting a GIF which shows My Little Pony carrying out acts that would be difficult for even David Attenborough to explain to a child.

Kids were no help. Apparently one bloke got a message from his daughter which had "a very explicit image" of "a woman giving oral sex to a well-endowed male". Her daughter hadn't searched for anything explicit, just the word "huge".

GIF search is one of the super cool new features built into iMessage in iOS 10 which apparently makes it worthwhile spending a fortune on upgrading to an iPhone. Other nude images are accessible through searches of misspelled body parts, though we haven't seen anything quite as explicit as what comes up for "huge".

Apple is not saying anything but apparently it has banned the world “Butt” and “Huge” from being searched.

Cryptography researchers at John Hopkins University have found another flaw in the encryption used by Apple’s iMessage and while Jobs' Mob might have fixed it, the researchers say that the company's encryption methodology is borked.

Jobs' Mob has been slammed for not making the details of how it encrypts messages open source. iMessage encrypts messages, pictures, and videos end-to-end by default, but Apple refuses to open the code and make it reviewable. As a result security bugs are not spotted until someone finds a huge hole to exploit.

Google and Facebook recently adopted the open source Signal encryption protocol or some of their messaging products. By contrast, Apple cooks up its own method of encrypting messages that is kept largely secret.

The bug discovered by the researchers allowed a sophisticated attacker, say a nation state like the United States or China, to decrypt stored iMessage data. It was not an easy attack and requires hitting Apple’s servers or stealing authentication certificates. But once executed, the “chipertext attack” could fully decrypt some older iMessages.

Attacks from nation state hackers are going to become more common and the attack vector more agressive. The paper says:

Despite its broad deployment, the encryption protocols used by iMessage have never been subjected to rigorous cryptanalysis. In this paper, we conduct a thorough analysis of iMessage to determine the security of the protocol against a variety of attacks. Our analysis shows that iMessage has significant vulnerabilities that can be exploited by a sophisticated attacker.

The best way for you to protect yourself is by regularly updating your software so that you can get the latest and most relevant security updates. Apple, for instance, patched this bug before it was even widely known. This isn’t just true on iOS, but on all software that you use.

Apple could not have dreamed of a better time to introduce iMessage, its proprietary messaging service native to iOS 5. While RIM is facing serious issues with its Blackberry data service, Apple is getting some rather good press, and believe it or not this time it’s justified.

The Blackberry outage has been plaguing users for more than three days. However, it started in Europe, so it did not gain a lot of media coverage, but now that it’s spreading to the US, the media are making a big deal out of it, perhaps even too big. Of course, there is a sense of poetic justice in all this. Crackberry addicted US bankers were largely to blame for the economic crisis which spread to Europe and the rest of the world, so the crippling outage emerging out of Europe is a bit like giving AIDS back to monkeys.

One thing that both services have in common though is that they tend to make wireless carriers pretty cross. Provided they work of course. Both services allow users to bypass carriers and shoot off longer messages with some additional content as well. Apple’s iMessage lets iPhone users send text, photos and video to all other iOS devices, so the user base is there.

Telecoms make a lot of money on texting as it takes up very little bandwidth and allows rather high margins. Of course, the wireless industry has no-one to blame but itself, as it kept clinging to mid-90s technology in an effort to squeeze as much money out of it as possible, without cheap and technologically superior alternatives. In addition, iMessage lets users take advantage of WiFi, so they can send messages free of charge abroad, from cafes and hotels.

On a positive note, RIM is getting its services back in order, but it is dealing with a large backlog of emails stuck in the system. Anyway, here is a Thursday morning joke.